World Affairs

The Elimination Project - Israel's Assault on Palestinian Collective Life in the West Bank

Source: B'tselem   September 14, 2026

Since the current Israeli government took office at the end of 2022, and even more so since October 2023, Israel has dramatically escalated its assault on all aspects of Palestinian life in the West Bank. At any moment, Palestinians may be exposed to violence by soldiers or armed settler militias, arrested and imprisoned, subjected to abuse and humiliation, and sometimes even killed.

The Elimination Project draws on more than 2,000 testimonies B'Tselem collected from Palestinians since October 2023 and over three decades of documenting the Israeli apartheid regime's human rights abuses in the West Bank.

The report looks at the current reality not as a collection of isolated incidents or specific harms, but as part of a comprehensive mechanism of elimination that works to dismantle the conditions for continued Palestinian existence in the West Bank, while deepening Jewish control and supremacy in an irreversible manner. An examination of the current reality in the West Bank reveals that the project of elimination is now being implemented more openly, directly and violently than before, and increasingly relies on cooperation between official state authorities and settler militias operating in the West Bank with state backing and support.

Introduction

At the time of this report's publication, a broad Israeli assault is underway in the West Bank, rapidly and systematically dismantling all the foundations of Palestinian existence. Since the formation of the current government at the end of 2022, and with even greater intensity since October 2023, Israel has dramatically escalated its assault on all areas of life for Palestinians in the West Bank. The ability to get to work, take children to school, attend university, receive medical care or municipal services, meet with family and acquaintances, cultivate one's land, go on vacation, or attend cultural events, along with hundreds of other ordinary activities that make up daily life, are all under constant Israeli attack and are sometimes denied altogether. Over and above all this looms a constant threat to life and bodily integrity. At any moment, Palestinians may be exposed to violence by soldiers or armed settler militias, arrested and imprisoned, subjected to abuse and humiliation, and sometimes even killed. As the report shows, this combined assault, which targets Palestinians both as individuals and as a collective, has turned the lives of some 3.5 million people into a constant reality of oppression and dispossession imposed by the Israeli regime.

Human rights documentation, and the public discourse surrounding it, tend to focus on individual incidents of concrete harm. This report takes a broader view. It examines the reality in the West Bank as a complex system with an underlying logic, implemented through different practices by a range of Israeli actors working at the same time and in coordination with one another. Viewed this way, Israel's actions in the West Bank are not simply a series of separate violations of individual and collective rights. Rather, they are part of a comprehensive mechanism of elimination. Here, elimination means the sustained undermining of the conditions that allow Palestinians to exist as an independent collective with land, institutions, language, culture, social ties, leadership, shared memory and history, and a social and political horizon. Israel's project of elimination in the West Bank is reshaping the territory and the conditions of life within it so that Israeli control and presence become continuous, institutionalized, and permanent, while Palestinian existence becomes fragmented, vulnerable, and dependent.

This report shows how Israel is implementing this mechanism of elimination through five main domains: violence and intimidation, movement restrictions, economic strangulation, social and political destruction, and ethnic cleansing and territorial takeover.

These five domains operate at once and reinforce one another. Movement restrictions and economic strangulation damage livelihoods, social ties, and Palestinians' ability to sustain institutions and engage in political life. The resulting political and social harm weakens Palestinians' ability to defend their rights and maintain their ties to the territory and the land. Together, these processes facilitate the expansion of Israeli control over the West Bank and the displacement of Palestinians from it. Displacement tears communities apart and harms homes, agriculture, collective memory, and geographic continuity. Violence is the central means of coercion that makes the entire system possible and accelerates its operation.

The project of elimination is not limited to dismantling Palestinian life. It also involves Israel's ongoing, open, and explicit effort to deepen its control over the West Bank and reorganize it around continuous Israeli presence. This is not only a matter of physical territory. The Israeli regime is also increasingly claiming exclusive ownership of the historical, religious, and identity-based narratives that shape the land between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea. Israeli flags fill the West Bank, while Palestinian flags are repeatedly removed from public spaces. Israeli forces provide protection for organized pogroms by settlers while violently suppressing Palestinian protests. Settlement farms and outposts serve as tools for taking control of vast areas of land, while Palestinian farmers lose access to their fields and entire communities are uprooted. Together, these practices show how the Israeli regime is organizing the territory according to its core principle: Jewish supremacy.

To understand the reality now taking shape in the West Bank, it is necessary to examine the ideological roots and governing structures on which this Israeli mechanism of elimination rests. As this report shows, the Zionist-Israeli project has clear settler-colonial characteristics: it has pursued Jewish Israeli sovereignty in a territory inhabited by an Indigenous Palestinian population through displacement, expulsion, dispossession, fragmentation, and the weakening of Palestinian existence.

Since its founding, the State of Israel has structured both the territory and the distribution of rights in ways that give Jews preference over Palestinians. This is the historical foundation of the apartheid regime described in this report. Defining the Zionist-Israeli project as bearing settler-colonial characteristics does not deny Jewish historical, religious, or cultural connection to this land; the longstanding presence of Jewish communities here; or the long history of persecution, displacement, and violence Jews have endured. The question is not whether there is a Jewish affiliation to the land, but how the Zionist-Israeli project has sought to establish exclusive Jewish Israeli sovereignty in a land where Palestinians lived, and still live.

This history is essential to understanding the current phase of the project of elimination. This phase relies on mechanisms Israel has developed and used for decades. But since the formation of the current government at the end of 2022, and especially since October 2023, the use of those mechanisms has accelerated and intensified. In the Gaza Strip, the logic of elimination has taken its most extreme form: the genocide Israel is committing against Palestinians there. In the West Bank, it is taking a different form, through the five domains described in this report. The two arenas are not disconnected from one another. Since October 2023, Israel has pushed the boundaries of its violence in the West Bank, too. Practices that were rare there, and are associated with the war in Gaza, have become more common. These include airstrikes, broad destruction of residential areas and infrastructure, mass displacement, and significant easing of the open-fire policy.

The "Decisive Plan" published in 2017 by Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich is key to understanding the current reality in the West Bank. The document openly lays out the logic of elimination and links settler-colonial ideology to a political program. It presents Palestinians with three options: live under Jewish supremacy and abandon their national claims, leave, or face violent repression if they resist. In recent years, central elements of the "Decisive Plan", and of the logic underlying it, have been translated into policy, budgets, government powers and practices on the ground.

The Israeli practices described in this report also have clear legal implications. While "elimination" is not a discrete legal category, and international law does not define this undertaking as a single offense, it does identify and prohibit the project's various components. The report's legal analysis finds that Israel is using its military occupation of the West Bank as a central tool for maintaining an apartheid regime. It further finds that the inhuman acts committed under that regime, and in order to uphold it, meet the legal definition of apartheid, which is a crime against humanity. The policies and practices described in the report also involve other serious violations of international law, including violations of the prohibitions on annexation, settlement, deportation, and forcible transfer, as well as of Palestinians' right to self-determination.

B'Tselem has been documenting Israeli violations of Palestinian human rights and investigating the Israeli regime's mechanisms of control and repression for decades. In this capacity, it has continued since October 2023 to closely monitor developments in the West Bank and document the genocide in the Gaza Strip. The present report draws on this body of knowledge, including approximately 2,000 testimonies collected in recent years from Palestinians in the West Bank; ongoing field documentation and research; the work of other organizations; and the analysis of official documents, legislation, government resolutions, and other data. It is grounded in the understanding that documenting each incident on its own, however essential that work may be, is not enough. The report connects the different violations, examines the logic that ties them together and the mechanisms that enable them, and presents an overall picture of the reality the Israeli regime is creating in the West Bank.

The report concludes that the current reality in the West Bank is neither a temporary crisis nor a collection of random human rights violations. It is an accelerated and explicit phase in an ongoing project of elimination that operates within the Israeli apartheid regime and is driven by a settler-colonial logic of dispossession, displacement, and the establishment of Jewish Israeli sovereignty. Targeted measures may mitigate harm and provide short-term protection for certain individuals, and are therefore important. However, they do not change the underlying structure that generates the violence, dispossession, and oppression. Partial reforms or a return to a more "restrained" form of control cannot transform a system based from its inception on dispossession, plunder, and oppression into one that respects human rights.

The political and international implications are urgent. The international community is facing an apartheid regime that deploys mechanisms of elimination within a settler-colonial project, and is doing so in an ever-accelerating and intensifying manner. For decades, the international community has granted the Israeli regime de facto impunity. Rather than taking decisive action to stop Israel's crimes, as international law requires, it has largely made do with calling on Israel to "return to the political process," "use restraint," and "avoid unilateral measures." Political, diplomatic, military and economic support for Israel, together with the diplomatic protection it receives, provides the Israeli regime with the resources, legitimacy and freedom to continue committing crimes against Palestinians. The genocide in Gaza has not prompted the fundamental shift in international policy that the scale of the crimes requires. The same impunity also allows the violence, economic strangulation, social and political destruction and ethnic cleansing in the West Bank to continue.

Protecting Palestinians' human rights requires ending Israel's crimes and dismantling its apartheid regime. A future of freedom, justice, equality and democracy for all who live between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea requires that the Palestinians' individual and collective rights be recognized. This includes their right to determine their own future and the establishment of a political order that is not based on supremacy, dispossession and elimination.

Methodology

Among the questions guiding the report are:
  • How can we understand the overarching logic of the Israeli regime that has sustained systematic violation of rights and the abuses against Palestinians in the West Bank over decades?
  • What characterizes the Israeli regime's actions in the West Bank since October 2023? What trends emerge, and what do they reveal about the current political moment?
  • How do Israel's patterns of control and violence affect the ability of Palestinians in the West Bank to sustain themselves as individuals and as a collective?
These questions are explored across several dimensions: the scale and frequency of harm; the conduct of the military, police, Civil Administration, and armed settlers, and the degree of coordination among them; the impunity and institutional backing afforded to Israelis; and the cumulative effect of these practices on Palestinians' ability to sustain social, economic, and political life in the West Bank.

The methodology for this report combines field research with analysis of other publicly available sources, including surveys and journalistic and historical sources. B'Tselem field researchers who live in the West Bank systematically gather information on the ground among their own communities. They collect testimonies about Israeli acts of both physical and psychological violence, home demolitions, and the displacement of Palestinian communities. Whenever possible, they interview those directly affected, their relatives, and members of the community. They also investigate events and broader phenomena through structured, in-depth interviews and ongoing follow-up, while collecting quantitative data and visual documentation, including videos and photographs.

The research also analyzes how the various arms of the Israeli regime operate in coordination, including both official institutions and civilian actors acting under their auspices in the West Bank. This analysis draws on field observations and on Israeli political and public discourse as reflected in the media and on social media. It also relies on Hebrew-, Arabic-, and English-language journalism, reports by civil society organizations, and B'Tselem's internal databases.

Quantitative data presented here also draw on reports by aid and development organizations, including UN agencies, and local NGOs as well as on investigations by established media outlets that adhere to journalistic ethics and rigorous fact checking. It also relies on available official documents from Palestinian institutions, which provide figures on people killed or injured and on arrests, as well as data on damage to property and infrastructure, harm to agriculture, movement restrictions, and more. The report also uses official Israeli sources, including military orders, administrative decisions, and legal documents published by government, military, and administrative bodies.

By drawing on this range of sources and cross-checking them, the report situates individual cases within broader patterns of regime conduct. It examines human rights violations in several key categories: direct physical harm, including killings and severe violence; measures that constrain daily life, such as movement restrictions and economic strangulation; and policies that undermine Palestinian society, including social and political destruction, ethnic cleansing dispossession, and expulsion. Taken together, these practices form an integrated system of control, displacement, and elimination in the West Bank. The data serve both to document violations in their legal, political, and social dimensions and to illuminate the workings of the Israeli regime. Whether a testimony concerns a road closure or demolition, violence against shepherds, the arrest of a minor, or killing of workers who crossed the Separation Barrier, the report examines it not only as an account of a particular event, but also for what it reveals about the wider system of control, strangulation, displacement, and elimination.

The fact that the organization's field researchers live within the communities in which they work and maintain ongoing relationships with them is another central component of the research methodology. This approach recognizes that those who live the difficult everyday reality of the West Bank possess knowledge essential to understanding it. The researchers' sustained familiarity with the communities enables them to understand local contexts, identify persistent patterns, and trace gradual changes on the ground over time. In this sense, the report relies both on gathering information about Palestinian communities in the West Bank and on producing knowledge through direct, ongoing engagement, which enables an understanding of the logic of the Israeli regime in the West Bank.

As a human rights organization, B'Tselem conducts this research out of a deep commitment to protecting human rights generally, and the rights of Palestinians living under Israeli control in particular.

This research is conducted amid military control, ongoing violence, fear, movement restrictions, and real danger to West Bank residents. Worsening conditions on the ground make it more difficult to collect information, reach the sites of incidents, document events, conduct interviews, and verify details in real time. These constraints arise directly from the reality the report describes and formed part of the conditions under which it was produced.

Political Framework

Introduction

Since the current Israeli government was formed at the end of 2022, and especially since October 2023, Israeli violence against Palestinians has intensified. The mechanisms Israel has used against Palestinians for decades have become more violent, more overt and almost entirely unrestrained. Today, the abuse focuses more directly on Palestinians' living conditions. Severe violence against civilians, expulsion, mass incarceration, torture, destruction and plunder have become widespread, explicit and normalized in Israeli public discourse. Moreover, practices that were once denied or presented as "lawful" and compliant with international law are increasingly presented by Israeli politicians and the Israeli media as tools of deterrence or revenge and, at times, even as successfully implemented policy.

In the West Bank, this escalation has created a reality in which millions of Palestinians live in constant fear of Israeli military and civilian violence. Palestinian communities are displaced in an accelerating process of ethnic cleansing, while an ever-expanding Israeli presence is being established in the form of settlements, outposts, farms and Israeli-only civilian infrastructure. The direct and persistent damage inflicted on people's lives, bodies, homes, livelihoods, family ties and ability to manage their own lives steadily dismantles the conditions that underpin Palestinians' capacity to exist as individuals, communities and a collective on their land.

Israeli apartheid is a system of government designed to advance Jewish supremacy throughout the territory under its control: it grants Israeli Jews1 full rights and continuous control over territory, land and political power, while dividing Palestinians into separate groups, denying them the ability to act as a unified political and social collective, dispossessing them of their land, subjecting them to discriminatory laws, and exposing them to harm and repeated attacks by Israeli military forces and armed settler militias.

The escalation of recent years lays bare a mode of reasoning central to Israel's treatment of Palestinians: the logic of elimination. In the West Bank, the focus of this report, this logic is now operating at an accelerated pace and with particular openness. Elimination in this context means the sustained undermining of the conditions that enable Palestinians to exist as a people with land, institutions, language, culture, social ties, leadership, shared memory, history and a social and political horizon. Elimination is not merely a collection of violent practices or separate policy measures. It is an ongoing political project that seeks to reorganize space and living conditions so that Israeli presence becomes continuous, institutionalized and permanent, while Palestinian existence is fragmented and rendered vulnerable and dependent.

Even amid this effort at elimination, Palestinians continue to maintain family and community life, preserve their attachment to the land, and struggle for their rights and future.

The logic of elimination is the basic logic of settler colonialism, which is a project that seeks to establish permanent settler sovereignty over a territory already inhabited by an Indigenous people. It achieves this by pushing them out, dispossessing them and dismantling their collective existence. In the Israeli case, apartheid is the form of rule through which the elimination project manages the Palestinians' continued presence in the territory, restrict the possibilities for Palestinian life and dismantles their power as a collective.

The events of October 2023 accelerated processes already underway within a regime that embodied the logic of elimination. In Gaza, this logic has taken on its most extreme form: the genocide Israel is committing against Palestinians in the Gaza Strip, as B'Tselem analyzed in its July 2025 report, Our Genocide, including mass killing, destruction, displacement, starvation and sustained attacks on entire life-sustaining systems. The present report focuses on the reality of life in the West Bank today and examines it within the ongoing historical context of Israel's logic of elimination. Rather than discussing Israeli practices as unrelated measures, the report demonstrates that they are manifestations of a mechanism designed to dismantle the conditions required for collective Palestinian existence and establish in their place territorial continuity for Israelis and Israeli control.

Within this framework, the Decisive Plan, published by Bezalel Smotrich in 2017, when he was a member of the Knesset, is a key document for understanding Israeli action in the West Bank. Its significance rests in the way it openly, starkly and explicitly formulates the logic of elimination, linking settler-colonial ideology with a political action plan being implemented on the ground. This plan presents Palestinians with three options: to live under Jewish Israeli supremacy while relinquishing their national claims, to leave, or to face violent suppression by the Israeli military. In recent years, central elements of this logic have been translated into policy, budgets, authorities and practices implemented by various arms of the state, including the military, the Civil Administration and settler movements. The Decisive Plan articulates the rationale underlying what is happening in the West Bank today: the expansion of Jewish sovereignty and Israeli control by means of plunder, dispossession, land takeover, community displacement and dismantling the possibility of Palestinian existence with a claim to self-determination. All of this is intended to entrench Israeli control and make it irreversible, while reducing the Palestinian presence as much as possible.

The Logic of Elimination within Settler Colonialism

Settler colonialism is a political project that seeks to establish the permanent sovereignty of a settler population over a territory inhabited by an Indigenous collective. The existence of such a collective is a fundamental obstacle to the settler-colonial project: it lives there, is connected to the land, and often maintains a political claim to continue living there as a people. Settler-colonial projects work to reshape the space so that settler presence appears permanent, natural and legitimate, while Indigenous connection to the space is marginalized, denied and dismantled.

The term "logic of elimination" was coined by the Australian historian Patrick Wolfe. It describes how settler-colonial projects work to reduce, dismantle and remove Indigenous existence as a collective with a connection to the land. Elimination can manifest as efforts to reduce the Indigenous presence in the territory by various means, including killing, expulsion and confinement to smaller, fragmented areas. It can also operate over time through legal, planning, economic and spatial mechanisms such as preventing refugees from returning, dispossessing people of land, fragmenting communities, controlling movement and attacking social and political institutions. What these manifestations share is harm to the conditions a people needs in order to exist as a collective on its land.

Colonial elimination is realized through two complementary processes. One pushes the Indigenous people off the land, denies them their rights, destroys structures and institutions that express their permanent presence in the territory and strips them of political power.2 The other, parallel process, establishes a new order designed to populate the land previously inhabited by the Indigenous people with settlers and preserve settler supremacy in the territory from which the Indigenous people have been pushed out. Building new settlements, establishing infrastructure, public institutions and legal systems, and writing and embedding a new history are all part of the process by which control becomes stable and taken for granted. They render the presence of settler society permanent and legitimate, while Indigenous existence is marked as temporary, foreign, threatening or marginal.

Another central dimension of elimination is the creation of "Indigenous absence." This entails reducing an Indigenous group to the status of a local population, a cultural community or a collection of individuals who can be administered, moved, divided or incorporated on terms set by the settler sovereign. To this end, settler-colonial projects often portray the Indigenous group as not being a "people," as a group with no unique connections to the land or as people who belong elsewhere. Members of the Indigenous group may continue to live and work there, and to be administered and governed. However, within the new order they are treated as an administrative or security problem rather than as a people with a shared past, a connection to the land and rights that follow from that connection. At the same time, the land is presented as terra nullius, a land belonging to no one, which the settlers may claim for themselves by virtue of settling and cultivating it. When the Indigenous group is not entirely removed from the territory, control and separation can serve as means of elimination because they make it possible to administer members of the group as separate populations, push them off the land, strip them of political power and dismantle their ability to act as a people.

In the Israeli case, the Zionist claim to sovereignty rested on historical, religious, and cultural ties to the land, on the ongoing existence of Jewish communities there, and on a long history of persecution, displacement and violence, primarily in Europe, that culminated in the Holocaust. Identifying the Zionist-Israeli project as a settler-colonial project does not deny the Jewish connection to the land, nor does it disregard that history. The central question regarding the Zionist-Israeli project as a settler-colonial project concerns neither the existence of a Jewish connection to the land nor the hardship and persecution suffered by Jewish communities elsewhere in the world, but the methods used by the political Zionist movement to establish exclusive Jewish Israeli sovereignty over a territory where Palestinians lived and continue to live.

Historically, the Zionist claim was realized through organized immigration, which, from the First World War onward, was supported by Britain, the colonial power that ruled Palestine, and through the establishment of separate national institutions, the purchase and later seizure of land, the creation of a Jewish majority, the expulsion of Palestinians, the prevention of Palestinian return, the transfer of land to Zionist institutional control, the use of violence, including killing, and the fragmentation of Palestinians into different legal statuses and separate spaces. In this sense, the Zionist-Israeli project bears the hallmarks of settler colonialism - establishing settler sovereignty through the displacement, expulsion, dispossession, fragmentation and weakening of the Indigenous Palestinian population, and the elimination of its presence from the territory.

Manifestations of Elimination under the Israeli Regime

At its most extreme, the logic of elimination takes the form of killing, expulsion and widespread destruction. The Nakba, which began in 1947, and the genocide Israel is committing in the Gaza Strip are cases in point. Yet, manifestations of the elimination of Palestinians have been a constant feature throughout the history of the Zionist project and the Israeli regime. Elimination operates within a regime structure designed to establish and preserve Jewish supremacy. One of the fundamental mechanisms of this structure is the fragmentation of Palestinians into different legal and spatial groups: Palestinians who remained within the State of Israel after 1948 and received Israeli citizenship, residents of East Jerusalem, residents of the West Bank, residents of the Gaza Strip and Palestinian refugees in exile. This fragmentation allows Israel to administer each group under different statuses, laws and rights, undermining Palestinians' ability to act as a single political collective. It also allows Israel to allocate land and resources and regulate movement, thus furthering Palestinian dispossession and displacement and expanding Israeli presence.

Palestinian Existence as an Obstacle to Jewish Sovereignty

The conditions that gave rise to the logic of elimination can be identified in the Zionist project even before the establishment of the State of Israel. Once the project sought to establish exclusive Jewish sovereignty over a territory inhabited by an Indigenous Palestinian population, the existence of Palestinians as a people with ties to the land and a political claim to the territory came to be viewed as a demographic, territorial, security and political obstacle: It was a demographic obstacle because establishing a Jewish state required a Jewish majority to maintain, among other things, its ethos as a "democracy"; it was a territorial obstacle because Palestinians lived on the land over which the Zionist project sought to establish sovereignty; it was a security obstacle because Palestinians were perceived as a constant threat to the Jewish population and a potential "fifth column" within the Jewish state; and it was a political obstacle because Palestinians held a claim to self-determination.3

The Zionist-Israeli project also responds to the problem posed by Palestinian existence by denying Palestinian indigeneity: denying Palestinians recognition as a people with a prior and unique connection to the land and rights that follow from that connection. In Zionist-Israeli discourse, Palestinians have repeatedly been portrayed as a population that is not a people, as a group with no prior right to the land or whose origins and proper place are in other Arab countries. Phrases such as "a land without a people for a people without a land," "there is no Palestinian people," and "they have other countries" function as political tools for portraying Palestinians as a population that can be moved, fragmented, administered or excluded from the political community. In this way, Israel works to eliminate recognition of Palestinians as an Indigenous people with rights, a shared history, a prior connection to the land and a legitimate claim to self-determination.

1948: The Nakba, Prevention of Return and Dispossession

The Nakba was the first instance in which the logic of elimination was implemented on a large scale. Between 1947 and 1949, hundreds of thousands of Palestinians were expelled from or fled their homes. According to widely accepted estimates, about 750,000 people became refugees and were prevented from returning to their homeland. Hundreds of Palestinian communities were destroyed and depopulated; some were erased from the map. Entire areas shaped by generations of Palestinian life came under Israeli control, and a Jewish majority was established in a territory inhabited by an Indigenous Palestinian population.4 Israel then worked to reshape the landscape so as to impede the refugees' return and obscure traces of the Palestinian presence that predated the establishment of the state: the state established Jewish communities on the lands of Palestinian villages, renamed places, planted forests, destroyed the remains of Palestinian communities, and brought the land under the control of state and Jewish institutions. Expulsion and prevention of return thus served not only to implement a demographic policy but also to reorganize the space itself.

The permanent and ongoing denial of Palestinian refugees' right to return to their homeland is one of the mechanisms through which Palestinian uprooting and displacement continue, rendering the Nakba an ongoing process of elimination. The 1950 Law of Return allows every Jew in the world to immigrate to Israel and obtain citizenship, while Palestinian refugees, many of whom were born and lived in the country until they were expelled or displaced, are not permitted to return. The dispossession and appropriation of refugee property were enshrined in the 1950 Absentees' Property Law, which transferred control over the property of refugees and displaced persons to the state or bodies acting on its behalf. The 1953 Land Acquisition Law, along with other laws and mechanisms, retroactively formalized the transfer of Palestinian land to Israeli control.

This elimination also had narrative and institutional dimensions. In Israeli discourse, the 1948 war has been primarily described as the "War of Independence," a national story of state-building, survival and victory. According to this narrative, the expulsion, destruction and crimes committed against Palestinians are usually presented as byproducts of a war that could not be avoided, as consequences Palestinians brought upon themselves by opposing the United Nations' Partition Plan and the establishment of the Jewish state, or as the result of their flight, rather than as part of a broader process of expulsion, prevention of return and demographic engineering. In this way, the story of elimination itself is also erased: the Palestinian catastrophe is pushed out of the Israeli story, and the state's establishment is narrated in a way that obscures the role that Palestinian displacement, the prevention of return and the transfer of Palestinian land played in establishing the new state order based on Jewish supremacy.5

Within the 1948 Borders: Formal Citizenship, Control and Dispossession

Palestinians who remained within the borders of the Israeli state after 1948 were subjected to other mechanisms of elimination. Although they received Israeli citizenship, about 85% of them lived until 1966 under military rule that restricted movement, monitored political activity, suppressed protest and expropriated large tracts of land.

The land and planning policies that restricted Palestinian space within Israel also persisted after the military rule ended. The state established new Jewish Israeli communities on land transferred to its control, while no new Palestinian communities were established, except for several communities designed to concentrate the Bedouin population in the Naqab/Negev on limited areas of land. Today, Palestinian local authorities and communities within Israel have jurisdiction over less than 3% of the state's total territory and are subject to severe planning and development restrictions. At the same time, these land and planning policies also take the form of large-scale home demolitions, especially in unrecognized Bedouin communities in the Naqab/Negev, and an ongoing threat to the existence of entire communities.

This policy was also accompanied by tight control over the education system for Palestinians with Israeli citizenship, including its curricula and content. The education system was used to shape a subordinate civic identity while marginalizing Palestinian history, culture, memory and heritage and obscuring the connection between Palestinians who remained inside Israel and the Palestinian people as a whole. Where citizenship was granted, elimination did not disappear; it took other forms.

After 1967: Occupation, Settlement and Continued Fragmentation

The occupation of the West Bank, East Jerusalem and the Gaza Strip led to the displacement of an additional 200,000-300,000 Palestinians from these territories. Between 1967 and 1994, Israel revoked the residency status of about 140,000 West Bank Palestinians. It did so by removing them from the population registry it controlled, thereby preventing them from returning home. The occupation dramatically expanded the territory under Israeli control and imposed direct military rule over millions of Palestinians, while denying them political rights. In East Jerusalem, which Israel unilaterally annexed, most Palestinian residents received residency status rather than citizenship. At the same time, throughout the West Bank, Israel began imposing movement restrictions and developing a permit system. This system transformed Palestinian freedom of movement from a basic right into something contingent on Israeli approval: it could be revoked, restricted or suspended.

The mechanisms applied in the territories occupied in 1967 did not emerge from nowhere; they drew on earlier experience of military control over a Palestinian population. The military rule imposed on Palestinians inside Israel until 1966 served as a model for monitoring and administering a population by imposing movement restrictions, enacting a permit system, applying political repression and other means. After 1967, some of these tools were transferred to the occupied territories, where they were expanded and refined within the framework of occupation and direct military rule over millions of Palestinians without political rights.

After 1967, alongside its military control of the occupied territories, Israel advanced a settlement logic expressed in the establishment of settlements, land expropriation and control over planning and construction in occupied territory. Unlike the settlement pattern already employed within the state's borders, involving rapid, large-scale expulsion of the kind carried out in 1948, Israel established Israeli civilian presence in the West Bank, East Jerusalem and the Gaza Strip in the form of settlements, infrastructure, roads and institutions, as well as a military and security apparatus designed to protect that civilian presence and facilitate its expansion. Settlement was not only a result of the occupation; it was a tool for reshaping space, expanding Israeli contiguity, fragmenting Palestinian space, displacing communities and entrenching Israeli control in ways that make it harder to challenge. This created a single space under Israeli control, particularly in the West Bank and East Jerusalem, in which Israeli settlers enjoy freedom of movement, are subject to Israeli civil law and have access to state-provided resources and services, while Palestinians living in the same space are subject to military rule and depend on permit systems to exercise their rights and freedom of movement.

For decades, Israel continued to promote the legal-spatial fragmentation of Palestinians described above. One example is the Citizenship and Entry into Israel Law (Temporary Order), first enacted in 2003 and repeatedly extended over the years. The law almost entirely restricts the ability of Palestinians from the West Bank and Gaza Strip to obtain status in Israel on the basis of family ties to Israeli citizens or Jerusalem residents. In this way, the tearing apart of Palestinian families across different borders, rights and statuses has been perpetuated by law.

Oslo: Palestinian Administration without Sovereignty

The Oslo Accords of the 1990s deepened the fragmentation of Palestinians and gave it a new institutional and administrative form. The agreements were presented as a step in a process toward a permanent-status arrangement. Under these agreements, the Palestinian Authority (PA) was established as a semi-autonomous Palestinian governing body. It received limited powers to administer some aspects of civilian life of certain segments of the Palestinian population, while Israel retained control over the basic components of life in the territory: borders, movement, security, population registry, land, planning, water and resources.

The result was partial Palestinian autonomy without genuine sovereignty or control over the conditions that enable independent political, territorial and economic existence; many of the PA's powers were subordinate to Israel. The division of the West Bank into Areas A, B and C, intended as a temporary arrangement, became an almost permanent structure. It concentrated Palestinian administration in fragmented enclaves while leaving Israel extensive control over the territory between them. Ultimately, Israel retained military control over the entire West Bank and, in Area C, which makes up about 60% of the West Bank, administrative control, including over planning and construction, land and resources.

This structure enabled Israel to develop a system of roads and infrastructure connecting the settlements to one another and to Israel, blurring, for Jewish-Israelis, the distinction between the West Bank and the rest of the territory under Israeli control. It also deepened the fragmentation of the Palestinian population, separated communities and spheres of life, and reinforced the administration of the Palestinian population in enclaves. The Oslo Accords, which were supposed to remain in effect for five years until a permanent agreement was reached, became a key vehicle for preserving a contiguous Israeli space and consolidating Israeli control over it, while fragmenting Palestinians and administering the Palestinian population in enclaves.

Yet despite these mechanisms of elimination, Palestinian collective existence persists, as do Palestinian claims to rights, return, sovereignty and self-determination. Throughout all these periods, Palestinians continued to resist their fragmentation and displacement, insisting on their right to remain on their land and live there, maintain familial, social and political ties across separated spaces, build institutions, wage political struggles and demand recognition of their rights as a people.

Changing Forms, an Evolving System, One Logic

The Nakba, military rule, the appropriation of displaced persons' and refugees' properties, the expropriation of land, the military occupation and the settlements in the West Bank, Jerusalem and the Gaza Strip, the Oslo Accords and the legal-spatial fragmentation are not discrete, isolated manifestations. Over the years, the tools used to advance the Israeli settler-colonial project and establish exclusive Jewish sovereignty over the territory have changed and multiplied, but the logic underlying their operation as state mechanisms has remained the same: establishing a contiguous space under Israeli control while pushing Palestinians off the land, denying them protection and the ability to exercise their rights, and preventing them from acting as a political collective. It is against this historical background that one must understand the intensification of recent years and the way longstanding mechanisms of control, fragmentation and dispossession are now being applied more forcefully and openly.

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Source: B'tselem   September 14, 2026
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